Jov sez: On Raiding, Burnout, and The Blahs

January 19, 2010

I apologize, this post isn’t going to be anything along the lines of normal Snarkcraft content. It’s going to be a wee peek inside the life and status of Jov’s player. Also, it’s my blog and I’ll be emo if I want to.

First off, the admission: I’ve not really been playing Jov much anymore. For the past several months, I’ve been logging Jov in to raid, do occasional laps of the upper reaches of Northrend to fund my Frostwyrm habit and… that’s about it. Various things conspired against me, from current content, lack of ability to take a break, to computer issues. WoW had lost it’s sparkle, and had become a job.

I raided. I blogged. I modded. I strong-armed the cats on the healing team. I spent hours discussing recruitment, drama, and the general aggravation that comes with every family; when you love the people around you, but sometimes you just want to strangle them.

In August, I told Seri I was thinking about quitting.

I held out, though. I kept a “this too shall pass” attitude that I’ve mentioned I held toward ToC, ICC and previous raids in past expansions. I love mah peeps, and I wouldn’t trade that bunch of losers for the world.

But time went on… and on… and on. Things got harder, and real life stress reared it’s ugly head. (You can ask Seri how well I deal with stress. I’m probably one of the most neurotic people on the planet. Let me tell you, I can lose some shit.) In December, I did just that. I told Seri that when my sub expired at the end of January, I was gone. At that point, it wasn’t even an issue of WoW anymore. Holidays left me under a lot of stress; WoW wasn’t cutting it as a stress reliever. It was just one more job.

As is probably obvious by the fact I’m here typing this as opposed to flittering off into the nether (or wherever bloggers go to die), the turning of the calendar changed my perspective a bit. Well, that and Seri’s figurative clinging to my leg screaming “DON’T LEAVE ME WITH THESE REJECTS!” does a lot for a person. (>.> Okay, I made that last bit up. She was thinking it, though.) I have been playing WoW more; it has been a stress relief. Just… not my priest. Not any of my healers, actually.

Thanks to the wonder of server and faction transfer, my hunter (third character, long ignored due to being on another server and alliance) is now decked in heirlooms and whoring herself in lfg. And… it’s fun. I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a long time. There’s zero stress. There’s negative stress. I can put exactly as much effort into it as I feel like, and we’re not going to have a corpse run if I look away from the screen for a second.

But don’t worry, this isn’t going to be the rogue and hunter blog. I’ve still plenty of priest crap to talk about. Next week, I’ve a lovely post lined up about healing ICC at 2fps. >.<

I think a good way to avoid burnout is to never let the game become a “job”. Fortunately, my raiding guild feels similar. 100% attendance is not mandatory, even by our Main Tank. I took Friday (our first raid night) off to go see some friends last week, just because I can. I try to make sure that my priorities are straight, and wow is low on that totem pole. Also, if anything in game feels like a job, I know I’m doing it wrong. When dailies first came out, I felt like I was losing out if I missed a day or two. Then I realized that was silly. If I don’t feel like doing dailies on a certain day, I don’t do them. Same goes for random dungeons, profession cooldowns, and pvp. I get on the game and do what’s fun, and I don’t sweat it if I don’t run H HoR every day for that drop, or if I miss the weekly raid quest on my alts or if I don’t manage to run TOC 25 this week.

For raiding, I show up when I can (which is most of the time, since I chose my raid guild to fit my schedule) and when I can’t, I send mail. We have enough good healers we usually need to sit one or have one of us go dps, so its not like healing won’t be covered.

I hear you also. It’s just tough to work all day, deal with other RL issues, and then sit down for a few hours to burn up the rest of the night wiping and getting irritated with other guildies. It always seems to happen to me right when new content comes out. Grr.

I know what you mean, it does happen often that you get burn out not only from just healing, but the officer/leader position can turn stressful quite easily, specially when new content is coming out.

Just take it easy i guess, once i had to take a month vacation to realize that my guild won’t go down the drain just because i’m not there to schedule raids, that’s the good thing about having a group of raid leaders/officers you can trust, and teaching your members how to improve themselves instead of having to repeat stuff over vent during raids (of course that one is easier said than done but eh :P one can hope!)

My raiding is paused atm too: too many RL commitments! Or.. I just consider those RL commitments more important and there’s not enough time left to commit to serious raiding with my priest.

But Jov, this is no excuse when it comes to your blog. Do like I do: pretend you still know your stuff, throw in some odd logic and garbled stuff that nobody understands and conclude with “I told you so” or “draw your own damn conclusions”. People love it when I do that.

I’ve not been playing WoW as much lately – mostly due to lack of fresh (playable) content. The server I play on is only 13% horde, so there’s not really all that many of us, and so end-game content is not really all that accessible. Thanks to the LFG business, pretty much everyone is decked out in T9 stuff now, but raiding is a different matter entirely… 25s just do not happen due to severe lack of numbers (even collecting alts together for a Naxx25 run only nets about 20 people), a few guilds have completed ToC10 on a few occasions (but not ToGC), I don’t think anyone has got past the Antechamber in Ulduar, and ICC is not even worth considering! So all that’s left is the weekly raid quests and running heroics for the 345987345th time to get emblems to buy a full set of PvP gear for WG. As a consequence, what time I have spent on WoW, I’ve been very slowly levelling my ele shaman (complete with cloth heirlooms & WG mace) and have now reached the dizzying heights of lvl 18 with him!

I was exactly the same… wow was a job real life was stressful…i cancelled my sub..for 6 months.. am just coming back now and i love my priest again..

its fun and less pressure. I quit being an officer, quit being the healing lead, and now i only sign up to raids i feel like doing… thankfully my guild has been very understanding about my reasons for completely abandoning them halfway through Ulduar. but it was that or my sanity

Take the time off, do something else have fun and maybe the joy of being priesty healy goodness will return ..if not hunters get to curl up at night with a pet to keep them warm

you’ll find that after you are done mindlessly topping dos meters and owning most noons in bgs with your BoAs, you’ll be right back where u started. Why? Bc wow has meaningless pvp and nothing really player created/driven in the game. You should quit mmo’s bc I garauntee you can’t handle a real pvp game.. And u seem not to like the endless gear grind of wow. I myself do nothing but arena and pvp. I don’t do it for gear or honor . I do it to kill people cus that’s what’s fun. When a game with meanigful pvp comes out, I’ll be the first one to let my wow sub die

I’ll go out on a limb and say since she’s not concerned with “mindlessly topping dos” meters-or did you mean DPS meters – even when playing a hunter. The neat thing about being a raider is we’re less concerned about meters and PWNING FACE than we are seeing our team succeed, regardless of what character we’re on. Your leet honor kills mean jack when you’re ignoring team play in an MMO enviroment. Go play UT if that’s what you’re in to – that’s one less “OMFG YOU FKING NOOBS GET THE FKING FLAG YOU SUCKS” we’ll have to listen to. You should also know, if you read this site AT ALL, she could give a flying crap about that joke of a mini game called PVP – her focus is PVE – hence why she took her BoA gear into LFG.

That being said, I have many toons, including a hunter. Healing IS stressful, especially when you need to take a leadership role – hell that’s the biggest reason I refuse to be an officer. Sometimes, you just need a break. Take it. There’s SO MANY great games out there. ME2 is out, Dragon Age, Bioshock 2 came out today..hell I havent finished Fallout 3 myself. And we’re always looking for a good survivor in L4D 2 or TF2 if you want to take your scrub ass and play a “real” PVP game with us!!

I love Cherry Garcia Ice cream. But if I ate it every day, I would get sick of it too. Switch it up, either a different toon, different game, or just a small break. Why do you think I play so many games and have so many toons? WoW will still be there when you come back!